Its a bad ad world

My tolerance for Ads is pretty high, you give me a pretty girl to look at and I won’t be very critical. However if there is no pretty girl, it better be intelligent! I have stopped watching TV (except for sports) ever since I reached the age of reason (circa 2004 CE according to the urban legends).

I kind of made my own set of rules when it comes to advertisements. As a rule of the thumb any ad featuring Irfan Khan is boring, any ad featuring Akshay Kumar is dumb. Mobile company ads are usually interesting but the Docomo music is so over done that it now feels like inspector Dreyfus scratching a blackboard with an iron glove! The nerve on those people to run the ad so many times! Who do they think they are? Airtel?

Bad commercials are tricky; they stay in our minds for a long time. They are kind of quasi-successful in that sense. How can anyone forget Aman Verma cleaning toilets in the Harpic Ad? I remember the first time I saw it; I kind of forced my mom to boycott Harpic because that is the only way to punish them for inflicting the misery on citizens of India (g2 gets patriotic sometimes).

Speaking of cola ads, Mountain dew is the worst. What are they all excited about? Jumping from the planes, suspended from the air, breaking through glass to spike volleyballs at girls wearing scanty bikinis while riding sports bikes and all that enthusiasm just to drink something that looks like stolen urine sample from a diabetes clinic (now you know why the bottle is green :p).

But there were good ads too. I am sure a lot of us remember coca cola’s “pandav kitne the” ad which urged people to pay only 5 rupees for coke (most shopkeepers used to charge one rupee extra). It was around the time this ad was popular, a shopkeeper asked 6 rupees for a coke. So one of my friends making a reference to the ad asked the shopkeeper, “Pandav kitne the?” And the shopkeeper promptly responded, “Draupadi kosam oka rupayi egestra andi“, which translates in Hindi to “draupadi ke liye ek rupee extra saab”